Friday, October 05, 2012

In the second installment of my Dewey & LeBoeuf saga, I told how my late friend Charlie McCrann wrote a feature length horror movie script as an NYU class project, then later produced, directed, and starred in that film, in which I played a minor role. The movie has been released in various places and formats under various titles: Forest of Fear, Charlie's working title, in Asia; Bloodeaters, by which it was known at movie houses and drive-ins coast-to-coast in 1980-81; Blood Butchers I'm not sure where; and Toxic Zombies, under which it was packaged as a VHS tape, later DVD, and played on the USA Cable network.Now I've learned that it's been revived in Italy under the title Il ritorno degli zombi(The Return of the Zombies). The video above is of a review by "Mr. Massy" who,
I gather (my Italian doesn't go much beyond ciao and O che sciagura d'essere
senza coglioni!, my favorite quotation from Voltaire), does not think much of
the film. Perhaps there's a strong hint
in the graphic at 0.33. There's a snippet of my part, the very end of it, in which I
die perhaps the least gory death in the movie, starting at 10:50.

Monday, October 01, 2012

This is a mini iPod log. On my walk Saturday morning, I heard two songs that were both staples of the late night DJs on WBCN, Boston's first "underground" FM rock station, in the spring of 1968. I was then on the shank end of my first year of law school, and had just endured my first Massachusetts winter after many years of living in Florida. It was a hard winter, even by New England standards, and when, around the end of April, the last of the snow had melted and it seemed that every tree on the Cambridge Common had erupted in riotous bloom, I was ga-ga with spring fever. This coincided with, and facilitated, my falling hopelessly for a pretty classmate who was never to be my lover but nonetheless unwittingly shaped the course of my life.

Under these circumstances I was especially sensitive to the music I heard, and many songs from that time have become madeleines for me: Judy Collins' cover of Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides, Now"; the Chambers Brothers' "Time Has Come Today"; Jesse Colin Young's solo version of "Four in the Morning" (an hour at which I occasionally heard it while cramming for exams); the Free Spirits' (a short-lived rock group that included jazzman Larry Coryell and drummer Bobby Moses) "Cosmic Daddy Dancer"; and, perhaps most poignantly, another Joni Mitchell cover, Tom Rush's "Urge for Going." This seemed an odd song for springtime, with its tale of impending winter, but it fit the mostly low key mood of the late night playlist. Two days ago, as occasional brisk gusts hit the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, I felt the stilted shiver of the spine at the words:

At 66, these words have a different meaning than they did at 22; especially with the lines that follow:

I'd like to bring back summertime, and have her stay for just another month or so.

A little bit further along I heard another song from the BCN spring of '68 playlist that I find haunting, "Wind" by Circus Maximus, a band founded by guitarist, keyboardist, and vocalist Bob Bruno and Jerry Jeff Walker. If you quite naturally think of Jerry Jeff as part of the Willie 'n' Waylon Texas cosmic good ol' boy phenomenon of the seventies, it's surprising to know that he had been part of a band that produced a lush, Southern California romantic version of West Coast psychedelia. You can hear it in the video above, accompanied by a montage of art assembled by The Bacmaster.

Yesterday morning I looked out my kitchen window and saw an old friend heading into the Governors Island Channel toward the East River and her customary dock at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. I quickly changed from PJs to exercise clothes and ran out to the Brooklyn Heights Promenade where I got this photo of Alice Oldendorff, accompanied by a McAllister tug. Alice is a particular favorite of Will Van Dorp, publisher of Tugster: a Waterblog, where he once posted another photo I took of Alice heading up the East River. For some reason Shiptracking gives no information about where she came from; I can only surmise that she's bringing her usual cargo of crushed stone from Canada, likely loaded at Halifax.

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About Me

I narrowly missed being that rara avis for my generation, a native Floridian, when the U.S. Army closed its hospital in Tallahassee, shortly before my mother’s due date. She went home, and I was born in a city renowned in Vaudeville humor: Altoona, Pennsylvania. In that chilly March of 1946, the first sound to reach my infant ears from outside the hospital walls was likely the shriek of a steam locomotive’s whistle. This could explain my lifelong love of trains. Four surface crossings of the Atlantic in childhood also led to fascination with ships and the sea.

My father was in the military, so our family (I was an only child) went from place to place often in my early years. I was in England from the ages of five to eight (the first newspaper headline I recall reading is “KING DIES”; the King in question being George VI, father of Elizabeth II) and began my formal education in a rural county council (what we call “public”) school, where I probably escaped having my bottom caned only because the headmistress feared creating an international incident. Other places where I lived while growing up were Miami, San Antonio, Cheyenne, the Florida panhandle and Tampa.

I graduated from the University of South Florida (B.A., 1967) and Harvard Law School (J.D., 1970). After that, apart from two years' duty in the U.S. Army, I practiced law in New York City. I worked in law firms and as in-house counsel, and served on the boards of directors of an insurer and a reinsurer. On a volunteer basis I now write for Brooklyn Heights Blog and the Brooklyn Bugle, and also publish my own blog, Self-Absorbed Boomer, which has been described as "relentlessly eclectic." In 1991, I married Martha Foley, an historian and archivist. We live in Brooklyn Heights. Our daughter, Elizabeth Cordelia Scales, also lives in Brooklyn.